SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

Brooklyn Poet Wins Pulitzer Prize

Because of all the attention paid to the eye-rolling news that David Foster Wallace, Karen Russell, and Denis Johnson aren’t good enough to be called Pulitzer Prize winners, you might not have heard to whom the Pulitzer Committee awarded its poetry prize: Tracy K. Smith, the Boerum Hill resident and one of The L‘s Breakout Brooklyn Book People of 2011, whose collection Life on Mars “earned raves in the New Yorker and elsewhere for a perspective on memory, family, history and loss which balances intimate observation and cold cosmic objectivity.”

“I’m still a bit in-orbit with this news,” Smith told us yesterday by email. “It’s elating and also incredibly humbling to think of my work in the same context as that of other Pulitzer Prize winners.”

So, did she go out on Monday night—also her birthday!—to celebrate at the local bar? “Friends arrived with bottles of much-appreciated champagne,” she wrote, “and we toasted while our daughter slept in the next room.” Aw, so Brooklyn!